Introducing Performance Metrics to Improve Targeting and Call Quality

Many companies find it extremely difficult to implement sales force activity to target customers as defined in their Brand plans. Consequently, we often see a very high percentage of valuable sales and marketing resource opportunities delivering low value calls to target customers or worse, still high value activities delivered to low value customers.

The reasons for this can be quite varied but typically include;

• Lack of co-ordination between business objectives and sales force performance incentives & rewards programme
  

  Poorly thought out call activity metrics that are financially incentivised will always encourage “Call fodder”.
  Worse, it may also encourage inappropriate profiling (to ensure activity metrics to ‘Targets’ are also achieved)
  

• Inappropriate territory structures or resourcing to achieve the call plan (under/ over resourcing by geography)
  
• Lack of alignment between the Brand Plan, Sales Action Plan and their implementation
  
• Lack of a Sales Representative Customer level activity reporting to identify Individual Customers who need to be seen in order to achieve Brand strategy
  
• Lack of a robust monitoring process to support Sales Management take corrective action
  

 

Introducing Customer Quality & Call Quality as Performance Metrics

Recognising that improved customer segmentation and appropriate brand strategies to the most valuable segments will put tremendous pressure on sales forces’ time and planning efforts to see these Customers, organisations may wish to consider weighting call quality versus call quantity (where quality is defined by the message relevance and value of the customer this is being delivered to) and decide which behaviours they want to encourage, measure and reward based on Customer and Call value. 

We have implemented a Customer Weighted Points Value metric to replace calls per day as a KPI. For example, Customers are valued from 2– 20 points (based on their segment) and absolute calls per day are replaced by call points per day (Call Points = Customer points value X Call Quality). This takes the focus off the “6 calls per day” quantity mentality (where all calls are of equal value), and replaces this with a Customer quality X Call quality approach. This also encourages planning and execution of sales force time and effort to high value customer calls, with the only sacrifice being a shift away from calls to low value customers.

Introducing Customer Weighted Portfolio Value (CWPV) and how it can help you better define your Target Customers

Does your company take a ‘Lead Brand’ approach to selling? That is, does a specific brand preferentially occupy detail position 1 for a period of time with a particular sales team?

If the answer is yes, you are probably wasting 50% of your promotional effort…….Let me explain.

A Sales team will typically have responsibility for promoting a number of Brands —often in multiple therapeutic areas. Customers are often defined as “Targets” based on a ‘Lead Brand’, so individuals who are strongly relevant for the other Brands but not the Lead Brand fall out of the Target Audience. Additionally, while the Lead Brand dictates the Target audience, the sales team are asked to promote a second (and often third) Brand to this “Target” audience on all sales calls.

From our analysis of this common practice the company is often surprised to find that while they are achieving 2+ brand details per call, only ~50% of the total details are actually ‘relevant’ to the customer – i.e. ½ of all brand details were to non-targets for the brand detailed.

The triple whammy of this approach is;

• Up to 50% of brand promotional effort is irrelevant to customers – even when the effort is focused to ‘target’ customers
  
• Customers may be turned off the brand message of the relevant product due to the irrelevance second & third brand messages
  
• Some customer with a high overall value to the company (across a range of brands) are excluded from the target audience due to the ‘lead brand’ approach to targeting and are not adequately promoted to for any brands (lost revenue opportunity)
  

Lead Brands may also change from Cycle to Cycle, meaning Targets customers would change as well (driven by the lead brand target mentality), so consistency of promotional activity with key customers can be easily lost following the approach described above.

As previously discussed in our article about profiling & segmentation, it makes sense to profile and segment customers at the brand level rather than generalizing about a customer’s value across a range of products and therapy areas. In this way, you can tailor messages and promotional activity specifically for each relevant brand (refer to our article about differentiated brand strategies per customer segment).

But how can you best determine which Targets the sales force (and other channels) should focus promotional attention towards that will optimize the revenue opportunity for your company and ensure the highest degree of promotional relevance to your customers?

We advocate a Customer Centric approach which effectively dollarizes Customer value based on the aggregation of a Customer’s value for each of your Brands as follows;

• Determine a process that allocates a “points value” for each customer for each of your major Brands – based on their segment for that Brand
  
• Factor the points value to allow for each Brand’s strategic importance, product life cycle, customer segment responsiveness and return on promotional investment (ROI)
  
• Aggregate the individual points values for each Brand (weighted or factored) to determine a Customer Weighted Portfolio Value (CWPV) for each Customer (their overall value to your company)
• Use this methodology to drive sales force and marketing activity towards the “Most Valuable” Customers for the Team/ Company, while being able to define what constitutes each customer’s value at the Brand level and drive brand strategies accordingly

The benefits of this approach are as follows;

• Consistency in Target audience over time
• Ability to reweight brand importance or introduce new brands into the mix while still maintaining a standard process of defining Target audience
• Understanding of customers value to the company and the brand(s)
• Ability to drive a customer centric selling approach which improves the relevance of brands promoted to each individual customer (versus brand centric selling)

A Customer Weighted Portfolio Value approach to valuing customers has other downstream benefits as well, which include the ability to more easily balance territory resourcing requirements across a portfolio and restructure territories if required.

Getting the right information – in the right format – to the right people

Organizations that we have consulted to over the past 10+ years have often struggled with the challenge of providing the right information to the right people in a format that is suitable to help them measure, monitor and manage their areas of the business.  

So what has our experience in helping companies address this issue taught us?  

Keep it simple…  Simple uncluttered representation of relevant information helps business’s identify issues earlier (both good and bad) and helps drive the appropriate behaviour needed to constantly improve their bottom line.  

Data is rarely the issue…  Lack of data is usually not the issue – the data is there….somewhere.  Often it is inaccessible to everyone who needs it so the same data may end up being captured multiple times by different people across the organization, leading to multiple versions of the truth!   

Just give me what I need…  OK, the data is available to those who need it, but it is presented poorly or critical data is hidden in a million other sets of data.  As a result, the recipient is unable to identify the critical information or determine what the data it is trying to tell them.  

Talk to me…  Data is made available in a format which the user is expected to manipulate or decipher trends from.  This incorrectly assumes that decision makers are all black belt business analyst (we have never seen that!).  It is critical that the data is presented in a way that “talks” to the recipient with no possibility of misinterpretation or (ideally) manipulation! 

Where is the budget data?  The relevance of information is often lost because there is no point of reference.  “Are those sales figures good or bad?”… “what results were we expecting this month?” 

Keep it relevant.  Individuals in an organization need information that is relevant to them in order that they can measure, monitor and manage their areas of responsibility.  That’s all they need (or want) to see!  That’s it! 

Enabling your organization to easily pull together existing data and visually present the most relevant information needed to help individuals make better business decisions is the challenge of ever company, but those who mater it have a huge competitive advantage over those that don’t!  

Incorporating leading & lagging KPIs into your performance dashboard

In the world of business performance management we rely heavily on  it is not surprising to see a number of organizations monitoring their performance based exclusively on “lagging” KPIs.  Lagging KPIs basically measure something that has already happened.  A few examples of lagging indicators include;

• $ Sales
• # Orders closed last month
• Sales calls made last month

Most people will agree that the reason they want a performance dashboard is to enable them to measure and monitor their areas of interest in the business based on the results (against budget) and trends (over time).   While both are requisite to a dashboard, you should also make sure that your dashboard gives you the opportunity to understand the underlying reasons for good and bad performance.   The answers to this deeper level of understanding are usually only available when you incorporate “leading” KPIs alongside your lagging KPIs into your dashboards.  A few examples of leading indicators include;

• Future planned appointments with clients
• Proposals written

The ability to define and measure carefully constructed “leading” KPIs is challenging but, if done carefully, it can provide an organisation with some clear early warnings of likely future success or failure. The incorporation and association of “leading” & “lagging” indicators into a “performance matrix” also helps to identify exceptions and provide some insight into what may be the cause for these exceptions.